Aleksander Bezetov is a retired Russian chess champion turned activist. Irina Ellison is a university lecturer in Cambridge, Mass., diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, which felled her father. When she finds a copy of an old letter her ailing father had written to Bezetov asking how he can continue in a game he knows he’s already lost, she leaves her life behind to get an answer. The chess master is now running for president against Vladimir Putin, so he knows a lot about lost causes. Both personal and political, Dubois’ debut novel is a winner.

Angelmaker

by Nick Harkaway (Knopf)

Greetings to Joe Spork, the book world’s newest hero. He springs from the fertile, absurdist imagination of Harkaway in his follow-up to “The Gone-Away World.” Spork, a Brit like Harkaway, is a quiet clock repairman. Strange things begin to happen, and stranger people begin to show up after Spork repairs an unusual timepiece for a kindly old lady. The clock is a relic from the Cold War — a 1950s doomsday machine! And Spork, the son of a notorious London mobster, is forced to revisit his father’s lifestyle to battle the bad guys. Harkaway is the son of John le Carré.

The Sea is My Brother

by Jack Kerouac (Da Capo)

In 1943, 14 years before his great “On the Road” grabbed America by its lapels and shook it up a bit, 21-year-old Kerouac wrote his first novel. He was in the Merchant Marines and based the book on his adventures. Now published for the first time, it’s the tale of seaman Wesley Martin and and Columbia prof Bill Everhart — who, like Kerouac, quits school and goes to sea for some real-life adventure. The two are part of a crew shipping out from Massachusetts to bring war cargo to Greenland. Although uneven, there are plenty of hints of the Kerouac to come.

Mudwoman

by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)

Prolific author Oates’ latest novel explores the conflicted life of a fictional woman Meredith “M.R.” Neukirchen, the first female president of an Ivy League college. (For the record, Oates teaches at Princeton, which has a woman president, Shirley Tilghman. However, Tilghman is the second female president of an Ivy, not the first). Emotional hell breaks loose when Neukirchen runs into “Mudgirl” — a child who was found abandoned at a river’s flats — in this disturbing psychological thriller.

So Pretty It Hurts

by Kate White (Harper)

Nearly five years after her last Bailey Weggins mystery, White, whose day job is editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, is back with another delicious tale. Weggins, a celebrity crime reporter for Buzz magazine — and amateur sleuth — is weekending in the country at a big music producer’s house party (and also lamenting that boyfriend Beau’s left town to work on his documentary). At the rural retreat, supermodel Devon Barr is found dead, the power goes out and Baily is shoved down the stairs. Finally back in Manhattan, she investigates.